Bestselling author claims her husband poisoned her for 3 years in an attempt to cash in on a $1 million life insurance policy

• Best-selling fantasy author Sherrilyn Kenyon has filed a lawsuit against her estranged husband, Lawrence Kenyon, accusing him and his assistant of poisoning her for three years.
• Kenyon says in court documents that her teeth began to shatter and she lost chunks of her hair due to the alleged prolonged poisoning.
• The author says the poisoning was a play by her husband to cash in on a $1 million life insurance policy.

A popular fantasy author claims that her estranged husband and his assistant poisoned her food for three years in an attempt to cash in on a $1 million life insurance policy that he took out in her name without her knowledge.

Sherrilyn Kenyon, author of the bestselling "Dark Hunter" series, made the shocking claim in a lawsuit against her estranged husband, Lawrence Kenyon, his assistant, and their former IT specialist, filed January 7 in Williamson County, Tennessee court.

INSIDER obtained a copy of the lawsuit from Kenyon's publicist. In it, the author says she first started feeling sick in the late fall of 2014, but doctors couldn't explain what was making her ill.

Over the next three years, Kenyon continued to show strange symptoms that would often leave her bedridden, the lawsuit says, including extreme nausea and vomiting, vertigo, tremors, and respiratory distress. During this time, she says her teeth began to shatter and her hair started falling out in chunks.

In March 2018, her husband Lawrence filed for divorce and moved out of her home. The lawsuit says that the longer he was away, the healthier Kenyon got.

Soon after the divorce filing, Kenyon says she went to a doctor to get her blood, nails, and hair tested for toxins.

"The results were startling, showing that her body had high levels of lithium, tin, barium, platinum and thorium," the lawsuit says.

After getting the results, Kenyon believed that her husband and his assistant had been poisoning her food, which they "would force her to eat and become enraged any time she failed to consume it," according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit gives examples of incidents where Kenyon believes she was poisoned, including one occasion in October 2017, when she was working with another woman and her husband brought the two of them food.

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The lawsuit alleges that Lawrence was careful that his wife got the right burger and that the moment she took a bite, "her throat began to close up and she started violently choking."

One of the couple's three sons witnessed another incident in February 2018, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit says Kenyon began "violently choking on food" that her husband had provided her, and "did not offer aid or express any concern, even though Ms. Kenyon was clearly turning blue and could not draw a breath."

She started vomiting on the floor, causing her son "extreme distress for fear of his mother's life," the court documents say. But the lawsuit says all her husband did was tell the boy "she does that all the time, ignore it."

The lawsuit claims that initially Kenyon didn't understand why her husband would "orchestrate this Shakespearian plot against her when he was lavished with expensive cars and other personal services that could only be obtained through [her] career success."

It alleges that Lawrence Kenyon "stood to gain millions of dollars upon her demise through life insurance and the value of her estate, including her copyrights and trademarks."

He allegedly took out a million-dollar life insurance policy on her in 2005, without her knowledge, making himself the sole beneficiary, the complaint says.

The two others named in the lawsuit are included because they "acted in concert with Mr. Kenyon and were rewarded financially by him," Kenyon claims.

Lawrence Kenyon's attorney did not immediately respond to INSIDER's request for comment on Wednesday.

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• R. Kelly's ex-wife Andrea Kelly said an online quiz made her realize she was in an abusive relationship — and gave her the courage to leave
• Why birth control is especially critical for women in abusive relationships

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